Monday, October 16, 2017

Scenes of Violence: Between Ultraobjective and Ultrasubjective Forms of Violence

How to make sense of the daily brutality that seems to surround us? Balibar's Violence and Civility can be seen as offering a sort of solution to this problem. Balibar's solution is framed in terms of three moves. First, he dubs inconvertible violence cruelty, the name suggests an excess, or in Balibar's terms inconvertible form of violence; it is violence that cannot be placed on any trajectory of progress, even the cunning of reason. Second, cruelty is differentiated in terms of ultraobjective violence, the violence of populations that are exposed to natural disasters, wars, or the effects of the market. This is violence without a face or name. Ultraobjective is contrasted to the cruelty of ultrasubjective violence, violence that is not only intended, with a face and name, but often is aimed a particular group. Third, and this is the most important point, there is the question of the relation between these two forms of violence, unified under the same name, but differentiated. As Balibar writes,

"One of our main reasons for using the word cruelty is not
just at it connotes extremity…It is also the fact that we need a term in which
the ambivalence of the relationship between the two forms, the superposition
and “logical” heterogeneity, immediately makes itself heard. This ambivalence
always haunts the idea of cruelty, since we can never say whether cruelty is
“all too human” or “inhuman,” personal or impersonal, endowed with a “face” or
not. If we must, as I firmly believe, maintain that the forms of ultraobjective
and ultrasubjective violence cannot be conflated either conceptually or
practically, and that neither, in that sense, is the reason for or ultimate
cause of the other, “determinant in the last instance,” it must nevertheless be
admitted that a whole range of phenomena in our historical experience,
particularly racism whenever it coincides with an outbreak of inconvertible
violence, superpose the two forms or circulate between the two."

"Returning to the problem raised earlier, I would like to
suggest that the Möbius strip provides a way of illustrating the idea that the
manifestations or phenomena of “ultrasubjective” violence (commanded by an
obsession with identity or introducing this obsession “into the real”) can at
any moment turn into those of “ultraobjective” violence (resulting from the
reduction of human beings to the status of useless and, therefore, superfluous
or redundant objects), and the other way around, although the “ultrasubjective”
and “ultraobjective” nevertheless remain fundamentally heterogeneous.
“Inconvertible,” each in its own register, the excess of sovereignty and those
of commodification (or the reversals of the constitution of communities and
those of commerce and the generalization of commodity exchange) or perhaps
still more inconvertible in that each constantly overdetermines the other."

It is worth noting that these are lectures, albeit twenty year old ones, and Balibar's thought here has a provisional exploration, and this is not even the last word on this relation. Having said all of that, however, I still think this idea of the Möbius strip is provocative, albeit incomplete. In order to think through that provocation, I would like to frame with respect to two examples. First, and I am sorry about this, there is Donald Trump. Much of what is written about Trump today is split between alarmist warnings about fascism and sober reminders that much of what Trump is pursuing at the level of politics with respect to immigration, war, etc., is really just the continuation of past policies. The same ultraobjective violence continues. Or, more to the point, Trump often crosses the from the objective to the subjective side of violence--flipping to the other side of the strip Case in point, his series of statements regarding Puerto Rico and the cost, debt, and limits of FEMA. It is quite possible that Puerto Rico would have received inadequate care and assistance under other presidents, and in some sense Trump's statements only explicitly name the objective conditions of logistics and budgets. What Trump adds, however, is a "subjective spin" on those objective conditions, fitting them into racist logics and fantasies.

Racism, as Balibar presents it, is always the intersection of both forms of violence, with their corresponding fantasies: the one which reduces individuals to numbers, populations, and things and the other which subjectivizes individuals and groups, seeing intentions between every actions. Of course the latter has, at least in recent history, been subject to a series of elisions and distortions. The ultraobjective logic of exploitation, domination, and exclusion was left in place, but to the extent that it was subject to a supplement of fantasy or ideology it was the ideology of objective conditions themselves, racism, poverty, etc., were effectively naturalized as the way of the world. Trump, or the forces leading to his election, have flipped the strip on this, placing these objective conditions in a subjective field populated by bad hombres, sons of bitches, and bad people on both sides.As much as these subjective excesses must be criticized it is important to not lose sight of their connection to the more invisible forms of objective violence. As Balibar writes, "To
think antiviolence as political innovation is to take up a position at a point
in the analysis where ultrasubjectivity comes close to ultraobjectivity." Critiques of violence risk collapsing into reaction celebrations of the existing social order unless they are capable of perceiving and rendering explicit the violence that passes as daily life. Hence the importance of Marx for any such project. As Balibar writes, making a bold claim for Marx in any theory of violence, "There
was, however, no theory of structural violence before Marx because there was no
theory of domination as an element in a structure capable of being “reproduced”
as a result of the play of its own contradictions or the conflict immanent in
it, not the action of arbitrary forces or an external ill will."

This is not to discount the actions and words of reprehensible individuals, they are dense nodal points in the perpetuation and escalation of violence, but to see the structural conditions of these actions. The former can only be the object of moral denunciations, the latter are the objects political transformations.